Graham Chaplow.
Like Jake and Elwood's Blues Brothers, and before 2017 proves an even worse year for musicians, now would be a good time for Bob Geldof to put his Band Aid crew back together.
A Live Aid gig right now would be the perfect elixir to 'kick out the jams' of 2016, to reflect on the year just gone, celebrate our mortality, raise funds for refugees, the poor, the starving and homeless, and provide a vehicle to highlight the controversy and troubled hotspots in the world, and put pressure on those running our lands to sort it out.
If events in 2016 were overshadowed by Donald Trump's meteoric ascent to be President-elect, 2017 is set to be defined by the backlash against it; for all the violence and homeland turbulence he incited along the way (the bill for policing protests at his inauguration is expected to exceed US$100 million).
Pundits who pooh-pooh any commentators denigrating Trump appear to have conveniently forgotten he actually did what he said during his campaign. It wasn't fake.
There was footage without any journalistic interference whatsoever where he accused a female news anchor of menstruating before his eyes.
Where he mocked Mexicans, Muslims and the afflicted, two war heroes (one Muslim; one senator) and incited supporters to punch-out journalists and protesters who dared remind him that he had.
'Make America great again (therefore the world)', was slogan-ism most cynical.
The only world Trump will propagate is his own.
The true reality for many in 2016 was a world ravaged internationally by war, terrorism, global warming, hunger, mass genocide, homelessness, unemployment and real poverty; with the latter of these, coupled with inequality, even felt by folks here at home.
As if terrorist acts by Boko Haram in Nigeria, strife in Sudan and a confessed mass murderer in power in the Philippines weren't bad enough, right at the forefront of media reports in 2016 was Aleppo - the once beautiful Syrian city reduced to rubble by Vladimir Putin and Syria's (aptly christened) Bashar al-Assad as a smashed futuristic last shrine to humanity.
I wasn't surprised seeing a loan gunman kill Russia's ambassador in a Turkish art gallery, screaming, 'Don't forget Aleppo!' Not a terrorist act as Putin put it. More an act of utu. A revenge killing - straight out of the assassins' handbook.
The contrast of Putin's full-blown state farewell for his ambassador friend flying his coffin home, compared to what looked like a fleet of filthy Go buses meandering through the debris of Aleppo said it all.
Millions Googled the image of 3-year old Alan Kurdi drowned face down on a Turkish beach, or the bombed out, blood and dust-covered boy sitting motionless amid the orange confines of an ambulance. God only knows what the face of terrorism is going to look like if Aleppo's maimed and orphaned refugee kids ever survive to be teens.
I was 14 and on my paper run in Napier when I heard President JFK had been assassinated (my first small step toward manhood). My friends and I scribbled 'ban the bomb' motifs on every wall. We were the first media generation shocked by a senseless war as images of the conflict in Vietnam were relayed into our homes: a girl, her skin and clothes burned off by napalm, running screaming, the best-known.
We marched in Palmerston North carrying eight coffins symbolising the first NZ soldiers killed by the Vietcong. We listened to speeches by Tim Shadbolt, played records by protest singers - Dylan's Masters of War, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger - and spoke of peace, love and understanding, sang, wrote poems and pleaded for an end to war.
Maybe it's time to pass Geldof's Band Aid cudgels to Trump's brave new Millennials.
Perhaps they could organise some sort of faceoff on Facebook: Face Aid. Or play Trump at his own game on Twitter: Tweet Aid. That's what it's come down to: a hacked nuclear society based on fake news run by a reality-TV-fixated world leader from his much smarter phone.
We're better informed now, but too damned desensitised or blasé to remonstrate about what's going wrong. Make 2017 a year for change.
- Graham Chaplow is a retiree, volunteer teachers' aide and award-winning writer.